Wikipedia for Schools

Welcome to Wikipedia for Schools! This selection of articles
from Wikipedia matches the UK National Curriculum and
can be used by school children around the world. 6000 articles,
26 million words and 50,000 images make Wikipedia for Schools bigger than
Harry Potter,
the Lord of the Rings and
the Chronicles of Narnia put together!

Wikipedia is great, but it wasn’t designed
with the National Curriculum in mind. And because anyone can edit it, articles
sometimes get vandalised. That’s why we’ve put together this special collection
to make learning as easy and safe as it can be. Here at
SOS Children, we’ve
checked all the articles, tidied them up a bit, and put them together by
school subject.

We would like to say thank you to the
Wikimedia Foundation, the people who made the
Wikipedia site. We would also like to thank the many people who have come
together over the years to make Wikipedia what it is today.

How to Navigate

You can find an article by clicking on the school subject
on the left of the screen. You can also choose from a list of all articles by clicking on
Title Word Index.

Wikipedia for Schools also includes Portal Pages.
These pages give a summary of a topic and list important articles inside it,
and you can find them by choosing Portals from the menu on the left.
You can use the indexes to find your way around but you might like to pick an
article and click words in the text to other articles.
For example, good starting places are
Africa,
The Solar System,
Tsunami or
Apple.

How the content was selected and checked

Topics we have selected include the very best of Wikipedia. We chose them
because they form part of the UK National Curriculum, and because we thought
they would be of interest to children. The
selection is vast, but because we have prioritised subjects on the curriculum,
not all topics are covered in the same level of detail. For this reason, the
Welsh town of Llandudno receives more detail
on Wikipedia for Schools than places given a similar level of attention on the
original Wikipedia site.

We chose articles from a list ranked by importance and quality which was drawn
up by project members. Then we sorted the articles based on relevance to
children, and removed unsuitable topics. With the help of
volunteers like Paul and Zaheera, SOS staff
checked the articles, choosing those versions of articles free from vandalism,
and then removing unsuitable sections. External links and references have been
removed as it wasn’t feasible to check all of these.

Wikipedia’s policies state that content has to be verifiable and
based on recognised and reliable sources. We haven’t included references and
sources in this selection, but you can check them on the original Wikipedia site if
you’d like to follow up on something you’ve read.

This selection is part of a larger collection on the original Wikipedia site, which we recommend
for older children in particular. We have tried to remove links to material
in articles outside Wikipedia for Schools, including images where we identified copyright issues. However,
occasional “dead ends” may remain, particularly on content boxes which are “part of a
series”.

Staff and volunteers at SOS have done their very best checking through the collection, but if you do see something which shouldn't be there do
please let us know for our benefit and that of the millions of people who use Wikipedia for Schools. We’ve fixed all the mistakes we came across,
while retaining a sneaky “easter egg” for our own entertainment!

If you find pieces of foreign text which appear as a string of question marks (“????”) or in a similar format,
it may be because you do not have that language font installed on your computer. If this happens, please check
the same article on the original Wikipedia site before getting in touch.

Wikipedia for Schools is a selection taken from the original English-language
Wikipedia by the child sponsorship charity
SOS Children.
It was created as a
checked and
child-friendly teaching resource for use in schools in the developing
world and beyond. Sources and authors can be found at www.wikipedia.org.
See also our Disclaimer.